Today, many social media editors and journalists use social monitoring or management tools like CrowdTangle, TweetDeck, or Hootsuite. In media, these tools are used for spotting viral content from lists of Facebook pages or Twitter accounts. Social media editors also use them to compare the success of their accounts against those of competitors. They do a great job of supporting certain user needs.
This is a post for those journalists and editors. These social monitoring tools help in many of your daily workflows. But if you’re interested in greater speed, a full world view of performance, context for stories and or content strategy, we think you need more.
NewsWhip surfaces all the content people anywhere are actually engaging with, and we do it faster than anyone else. To do that, we gather all the world’s content in real time, and monitor what’s getting engagement (shares, tweets, comments, angry faces). Our algorithms predict the important stories, events, and influencers in thousands of topics and places. We provide a bank of hard data to help eliminate the guesswork in editorial decision making.
Our customers include over 400 publishers in 40 countries. NewsWhip draws insight from how audiences interact with content, giving publishers a powerful advantage in four key areas: speed, coverage, context, and strategy.
Speed. How fast do you need to discover a possible story?
The fastest content producers we know say NewsWhip is instrumental in getting to breaking news quickly. Chetan Patel, Head of Social Video and Publishing at NowThis, relies on that speed each day. “When we see something spiking on Spike, we know that should move to the top of our list. Because it is that much more important.”
So how does NewsWhip have this speed advantage?
First, NewsWhip catches all stories within seconds of publishing, not just on a social network. We do this by monitoring anywhere it might appear — including websites, social accounts, or YouTube. We then track all organic sharing of it.
By contrast, social monitoring platforms only discover content once it’s shared to a public page, typically on Facebook.
It can take hours for a viral story to make it to the public Facebook pages you’re monitoring on a social monitoring platform. For example the average Washington Post story doesn’t appear on their Facebook page until six hours after publication. Here are the delays you can usually expect from a sample of publishers, and the extra “jump” you would get on a story using NewsWhip.
Publishers have various reasons for timing their Facebook posting — and our point here is not that they should publish sooner. But anyone monitoring those publishers for viral hits will be at a serious disadvantage if they are waiting for pieces to appear on Facebook pages.
NewsWhip can also accelerate your response time by predicting which stories you should give attention to each day. Our machine learning technology predicts the trajectory of millions of stories and Facebook posts every hour. That way, you can find stories sooner and know what to expect in the coming hours.
When French newsrooms united in the CrossCheck project to debunk fake news ahead of the 2017 French election, they used Spike because they needed a way to predict which stories would go viral, so they could stick a pin in any false stories. “The accuracy of the predictive feature was terrifying,” said Sam Dubberley of CrossCheck. “When something was predicted to get a lot of engagement, it actually did. The metrics were really valuable in deciding whether to follow a story or not.”
Taking out fake news early is just one of many uses for Predicted Interactions — but it’s one we’re particularly proud of.
Predicted interactions helps decision making in hundreds of newsrooms. Jessica Eggert, Emerging Editorial Platforms Producer at Mic says that “when I find a story on Twitter, I’m going with my gut on how it will share. When I find a story on Spike, I already know its viral share potential.”
Coverage. Do you want to explore the whole universe of possible stories?
Social monitoring is designed to give a view on trends from defined lists of social network pages or accounts. That gives a great view on the content from those pages — but it is entirely determined by the editors who decide what to share on those pages.NewsWhip users are not limited to posts shared to social accounts. They get every last article, post or any output from any site we track. And with Analytics, they can see how every piece of content over the past three years has performed.
This means you are monitoring the performance of all 1,700 stories Forbes publishes each week, not just the 200 they post to Facebook. In fact, on a given day, seven of the top ten most engaging stories for Forbes are never posted to any Forbes Facebook pages. Similarly, five of the top ten most engaging stories from Rolling Stone never make it to a Facebook Page.
Publishers these days are very focused on their Facebook page performance — but a full view of both the dedicated page and the organic sharing of all the content you produce is far more important. Organic social drives far more overall engagement for almost all publishers. For example, only 28 percent of Facebook engagement with WashingtonPost.com stories in a given week comes from it’s own Facebook pages — 72 percent is organic sharing by readers and third parties. For understanding that, they have NewsWhip.
Those organic shares are how you’ll get introduced to new readers — and new subscribers.
Also, because NewsWhip is built to monitor everything — not lists of social accounts — you can quickly become an expert in any topic, even one you did not expect to come up on your regular beat. What politics stories are making people angry in the U.K.? Just filter the content by reactions. What stories will be big on climate change today? Just search and filter results by predicted engagement. We have billions of stories in 60 languages ready for you to search.
This breadth of coverage is particularly useful for niche publishers who want to know everything in a topic, anywhere. For Kelly Burke of the Dodo, it “serves up stories with high viral potential from all over the world that you would have a very hard time finding on your own.”
For video editors, our coverage is also a boon. NewsWhip scours the web for trending videos, not just those native to Facebook or Instagram, but videos embedded in web pages — just filter your search by media type. Unlike other social media monitoring platforms, NewsWhip tracks YouTube, the world’s second largest website by traffic, and a vital source of virality, long-form video, and trends.
Context: Do you want wider context for stories you discover?
For journalists and editors picking stories and angles, NewsWhip gives you wider context at a story level: it clusters related stories, so you can see how every “take” on a story is performing, and how big each is predicted to go.
MTV News compare performance of angles and coverage around big events like the VMAs and Election Night, informing their own content strategy, as it unfolds. It also enables customers like Mic to find the “themes and topics that matter most to our audience.”
We aim to give our customers much more than lists of trending stories, instead tracking authorship, trajectory, influencers and other metrics to give a fully-rounded view.
On a day-to-day tactical level, our Entities — trends plucked from popular headlines — are a useful way to navigate the news trends in any sector without endless headline scrolling. Click each one to see what stories are driving it to the top.
Strategy: Do you want to build a strategy based on lessons and data that show what works?
Stories are fine atomic units, but you want to hit veins of gold, not nuggets. You want strategies on your topics, formats, platform targets.
For this our customers use NewsWhip Analytics, the world’s biggest content performance database. With our Analytics platform, you can monitor seasonal trends, and mine the content strategy of any publication, page or account.
Specifically, Analytics gives you a powerful breakdown of the exact content types working for any search term, publisher, facebook page or area of content. Should you write about machine learning or AI? Use video or photos? We have the data to benchmark your success day by day or week by week.
“Since using NewsWhip Analytics, we’ve been able to compare our coverage of stories to how other sites covered the same story,” said Andrew Fletcher, Audience Development Manager at MTV News. “It’s helped form content strategy for specials like the VMAs and Election Night coverage, and we’ve used charts from NewsWhip in reports. It’s great to see how other sites are trending over time to confirm our hypotheses.”
NewsWhip is also unique in the sense that we have a dedicated team of content strategists. Our CS team helps customers find and understand trends in a topic, discover today’s controversial stories, and create a data-informed content strategy. Our customers enjoy dedicated account management, free training, and on-demand growth of coverage when needed.
Speed, coverage, context and strategy are important to me. So what next?
The vast majority of our customers have found that NewsWhip returns 10x for every minute and dollar invested. Will it work for you?
To find out, get in touch and reach out to us at any time. We’ll walk through your needs and challenges, and get you and your team set up with a demo.